by Rae Davies
When it looked like everyone had settled into a civilized conversation, Patsy balanced the baked beans on top of a stack of paper plates and shoved the door open with her toe. Will looked up at her with a gaze so full of relief, she felt herself flush.
There was no reason she should feel bad that he’d been left to fend for himself. He wasn’t her responsibility. He was Dwayne’s guest. Plus, she couldn’t help it if he seemed to attract the women in her family like a trailer park did tornadoes. It was his own fault for being so tempting—clean-cut and fresh-smelling, but with an underlying masculinity that screamed a take-no-prisoners approach to life.
The short sleeve of his usual polo edged up over the bulge of his bicep as he reached down to pet his dog. Patsy felt a tightening in her stomach. Damn. He was a bad boy wrapped up in a take-home-to-momma package. No woman could resist that.
“Is the pork done?” She averted her gaze from the enticement of Will, instead opting to watch Dwayne give himself an uncouth scratch. Rolling her eyes, she deposited her burden on the table.
“Looks it to me, and it’s a good thing. I’m as hungry as a bear in the spring.” Dwayne forked the steaks onto a platter and handed them to Patsy.
Looking around for a place to set the plate, Patsy bumped into Will. Their encounter left a red smear of sauce on his previously pristine shirt.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, staring at the stain.
“No problem.” He reached for the plate. They stood for a moment, both of them gripping opposite ends of the platter. “Let me take it,” he said.
“No, I can do it.” Her hands tightened on the dish.
“Let me help.” He insisted, giving the plate a slight tug.
“I’m not the one who needs helping,” she replied, yanking back.
“What makes you the proper person to judge who needs help and who doesn’t?” Will asked. He held firm to his end.
She tilted her chin. “Upbringing. I know the difference between helping and interfering.”
“So I’ve noticed,” Will replied.
“You gonna serve that meat or just wrestle over it?” Granny eyed the platter poised between them. Patsy flushed. The party had gone quiet, everyone watching her and Will fight over a plate of pork steaks.
“Fine, you help.” She dropped her end, just as Will dropped his. Both of them stood open-mouthed as the platter flipped from their hands, landing face down on the concrete. A horrified silence cloaked the area.
o0o
Dinner was beans and more beans. Will offered to drive to town to pick up something from a restaurant, but Granny wouldn’t hear of it.
During the meal, Patsy had a hard time looking at him. It was like she’d been caught writing dirty words on the bathroom wall—juvenile and embarrassing. She should have just let him take the platter. Practiced her own preaching. Now he knew how much he got to her, and so did everybody else.
“The boys are leaving. You going with them?” Granny elbowed Patsy in the side.
“Hunting? Why would I go hunting?” Patsy snorted. As far as Patsy was concerned, Will couldn’t take off into the woods fast enough.
Granny nodded toward him. “Hmph. If you don’t know, me telling you ain’t going to help you none.” After giving Patsy a disgusted look, she went inside.
Looking up, Patsy realized she was alone on the patio with Will. “Where’d everybody go?”
“Dwayne and Randy went to get their dogs, everybody else went inside. They walked right past you.”
She really had to work on her concentration.
“About dinner. I should have let you handle it.” He lowered himself onto the bench beside her.
Patsy moved over to leave space between them. “No, it was my fault. I was being...”
“Stubborn?” One eyebrow arched upward.
“Stubborn?” she objected.
“Stubborn,” he stated.
Patsy’s eyes narrowed. Try to be nice and take some of the heat for something that was obviously his fault, and he had the audacity to call her stubborn.
“So, you ever been coon hunting?” he asked.
“Once or twice,” she ground out.
He resettled himself on the bench, running his arm along the table behind her. “Did you like it?”
“What’s not to like?” she replied. She could feel the heat from his arm along the back of her neck. Not quite touching, but almost. As she tensed, waiting for contact, her annoyance melted away.
He moved again, this time sending a wave of masculine cologne over her. The need to curl in toward him, to nestle her nose against his chest and breathe the scent in, almost overwhelmed her.
She curled her fingers until her nails dug into the wooden bench. Life was so unfair. She didn’t want this attraction. Wrong person, wrong place, wrong time.
Feeling vengeful, she looked him right in his two-toned eyes. “What’s not to like?” she repeated. “You chase a cute little teddy bear of a creature up a tree with a pack of howling hounds, shine a bright light on it, and shoot it right between the eyes.”
Will blinked.
Ha, she was getting to him. “And if you’re real lucky, when he hits the ground there’s still enough fight left in him to give the dogs some sport before they rip his furry little throat out.”
Will’s skin tone slipped from medium beige to somewhere in the ivory family. Patsy grinned. Teach him to walk around smelling better than Hostess pie a la mode.
Relief washed over Will’s face. “You’re kidding.”
Patsy grinned wider. “No, I’m not. But don’t worry. You’ll have a blast.” She motioned to Dwayne, who was strutting around the corner of the house, his dogs on his heels. “You got the crocodile hunter of the Midwest leading this expedition. Too bad it’s not coon season. He could show you the classy way to skin and bleed out the poor little thing.”
Will’s color slipped another notch.
Standing up, she leaned close and whispered in his ear, “If I were less stubborn, I might be able to help you out of this jaunt, but then again I wouldn’t want to offer help where it isn’t wanted.” With one last grin, she picked up some plates and sauntered into the house.
“What’d you tell that boy, sis? His face is longer than Uncle Sam’s inseam.” Granny peered over Patsy’s shoulder at Will, who had stood up to follow Dwayne back toward the garage.
“Nothing. He just asked about coon hunting is all.” Patsy ambled over to the trash and dumped in her load.
“And you made it sound like a cross between bashing puppies in the skull with a crowbar and eating your own young.”
Patsy sniffed. He’d wanted a taste of southern Missouri life, and she’d obliged him. No reason for her to feel guilty. “I told him he’d have fun.”
Granny nodded. “Sure you did, and he’ll feel real good about it if he does.” Her nod shifted to a shake. “Sis, you have a mean streak a mile wide.”
Patsy dropped the paper plate she’d picked up. “I wasn’t being mean. I was just telling him the truth.”
“You know, some people really enjoy coon hunting. Fact is, I’ve seen you come back a time or two hauling a fat old coon behind you and a grin as big as sin plastered on your face.”
“I was eight.” Why did everybody assume she was still the same person she had been as a child?
“And I’ve known plenty of folks who made ends meet selling coon skins. Times aren’t as good for everybody as they are for you. Did you tell Will what Dwayne and Randy do with them coons when they do shoot ‘em? Did you tell him about the Cuffe family? About those kids who probably get meat once a week? You tell him that?”
Patsy was silent. Granny had a talent for making her feel smaller than a dried pea.
“I didn’t think so. Next time you start poking fun at something, you flip it over and look at the other side. There’s no telling what you’ll discover.”
Patsy watched her grandmother stomp back out onto the patio. Why did things have to have two sides? Life w
as a lot simpler when there was only one, hers.
She tossed a scrap of dirty pork into Pugnacious’ kennel. Patsy had shoved her in it after the steak-dropping incident. It also kept the pug from following the coon hounds when they took off through the woods.
The little dog was already looking suspicious. She knew when dark fell, the other dogs would get to hunt. She gulped down her pork and started scratching at the metal clasp of the cage.
“You just settle back down. You have no business tromping around in those woods, especially after a coon that would make two of you. And agree with me or not, I don’t need anybody’s help to control you.”
Patsy shoved another scrap of meat through the bars and finished cleaning up the kitchen.
o0o
An hour later, Patsy decided it was safe to release Pugnacious. The sound of Dwayne’s hounds baying hadn’t echoed back at her for a good twenty minutes. They were either having a hard time catching a scent or they were too far away to hear their ruckus. Patsy bet on the latter.
“Okay, Pug Girl, come on out.” She bent down to release her dog.
The cage was empty.
She grasped the metal bars and peered inside. “Pug Girl, where are you?” She whipped around and searched the kitchen. “Pug Girl, you come out right now.”
“What you yelling about in here, sis?” Granny toddled into the room.
“Pugnacious isn’t in her cage. Do you know where she’s at?”
“How’m I supposed to know where that bug-eyed beagle got off to? I let her out to do her business a half hour or so ago. She should be sitting on the patio by now.”
“You let her outside?” Patsy’s voice quivered with outrage.
“Yeah, what’d you expect? You think I was going to hold her furry rump over the toilet? ‘Course I let her outside.”
Patsy’s eyes narrowed as she watched her grandmother sway back into the living room. Who did she think she was kidding? Patsy knew what was going on. Granny thought she could force Patsy into going on the coon hunt with Will. Just because Pugnacious was probably running as fast as her stubby legs could carry her to where Dwayne and his hounds were terrorizing a family of raccoons didn’t mean Patsy would beat a trail behind her. The pug would be fine. Dwayne was there. He’d watch out for her. Granny wasn’t manipulating her like that.
An image of Dwayne grumbling over his supper of beans flitted through her mind. He hadn’t been able to have a beer while he was within sight of Mom and Granny. It must have been killing him.
She checked the clock over the stove. They’d been gone an hour. Dwayne had probably worked his way through a brewery by now.
Patsy kicked the door of Pugnacious’ cage. Damn it all. She was going to have to find them.
There was only a sliver of a crescent moon tonight, and not much of its light would make it through the branches of the skinny oaks surrounding her parents’ home. Patsy pushed the button on the lone flashlight she could find, an old plastic lantern, probably from the 80s. The light flickered on, illuminating a space about five feet in front of her. It wasn’t much, but it beat her penlight. She searched the edge of the woods for a likely path.
Off to the right, the brambles had been flattened. As good a place as any to start. She strode into the woods. A century of dry leaves crunched under her feet. Tree frogs and whippoorwills sounded their calls. An orchestra of forest noises, but no baying hounds. Where were they? She swung the lantern’s beam around her, searching for direction.
Tufts of gray fur clung to a raspberry bush—Ralph. Guess that’s why hounds were all short-haired. Following the trail of fur, she picked her way through the brambles and down the hill.
o0o
“Not a scent yet. How long we been out here?” The glare from the light mounted on Dwayne’s hat momentarily blinded Will.
“Going on an hour at least,” Randy replied.
Thankful so far he’d been spared the sight that Patsy so sweetly described, Will leaned against a tree and reached down to stroke Ralph on the head. If possible, the dog was sticking even closer to his side than normal. Will wondered if he was jealous of the other dogs or if he somehow knew what the guns Randy and Dwayne were carrying signified. Dwayne had explained the weapons were just in case something went wrong; there was no benefit to hunting out of season. The coon skin market was dependent on a nice thick pelt, and the heat of Indian summer precluded that.
Even so, Will had waved away Dwayne’s offer to borrow a rifle. It was just a .22, but Will wasn’t a hunter, and he’d never handled a gun—yet another choice that had driven his father crazy. After resisting his dad for almost thirty years, Will didn’t see any reason to relent now, especially tromping around in the dark woods.
The sound of something pushing its way through the dead leaves that carpeted the ground startled him out of his thoughts. Heavy breathing signaled whatever the creature was, it wasn’t far away. He lifted his hand from Ralph’s head and pushed himself away from the tree.
“What in the blue moon is that?” Dwayne turned his spotlight toward the noise.
The breathing became more of a snort, but Will still couldn’t make out what was creating the racket. The hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention.
Searching the darkness, he wished he’d taken Dwayne up on his offer. His hand dropped to Ralph’s head. The dog seemed calm. That had to be a good sign.
More snorting and crackling of leaves. Sounded like a Suburban charging through an ice storm. Dwayne’s helmet light caught a flash of white. Will felt an accompanying flash of dread before recognizing the slobbering beast charging toward them.
“Pugnacious, how’d you get away from the sentry?” Dwayne dropped to one knee and rubbed the little dog on the white spot that decorated her chest.
The pug gave his hand a soggy kiss before swinging toward Ralph. She reared onto her back legs and pounced on top of the much larger dog. With Pugnacious attached to one ear, Ralph turned a woeful gaze to Will.
“Guess she’s prince hunting.” Will slipped his finger into Pugnacious’ mouth and disengaged her from Ralph’s ear. “That’s what you get for being a heartbreaker, boy.” A problem Will was not currently experiencing. The pug bounded off to the base of a tree where she continued sniffing and snorting.
“Patsy is going to have a fit when she figures out Pugnacious is out here. You think we should take her back before Patsy notices?” Dwayne asked.
“Might as well. We won’t be missing anything here, that’s for sure.” Randy stepped toward the tree where Pugnacious now had her flat face smashed to the dirt. As he bent down to scoop her up, she lifted her chin to the sky and let out a howl.
Dwayne stiffened. “She’s caught a scent. Beau, Piedmont, get over here, you worthless hounds. We’re coon hunting.”
Pugnacious took off at a run, her nose pushing a furrow through the leaves.
“Let’s go, boys. We got a coon to tree.” Dwayne jogged after her.
o0o
This sucked. Patsy had been stomping around these woods for twenty minutes and nothing, not a canine sound, not even a coyote. She’d gotten tangled up in more raspberry brambles than Brer Rabbit with his Tar Baby. She’d even tumbled over a rock and rolled into a sinkhole.
She hated sinkholes. The strange depressions in the ground gave her the creeps, like the world was being sucked back into itself. She clambered out of it as fast as she could, but dropped the flashlight on her way down, and it chose that moment to go out. She was stuck down there fishing through the leaves for what seemed like hours. Once she found it, a couple of good whacks got the light back on, but it flickered ominously. Her hair was littered with leaves, there were bloody streaks from the brambles on her legs, and she was pretty sure she’d become home for a colony of chiggers. She could not survive another tumble into a sinkhole. Damn that dog. Damn Granny. Damn it all.
A long howling bay rent through the air. Even though she had been praying for the sound, Patsy couldn’t stop the shiver
that flew up her spine. There was nothing as haunting as the noise of a hound on a hunt.
Well, they were out there. Now just to find them. She gave the lantern another shake, pulled some leaves from her hair, and strode toward the baying. As she got closer, it was impossible to miss the group of hunters. Lights bobbed across the trees, leaves crunched under running feet, and men and dogs barked out orders and replies. It was a wonder there was a coon left in Daisy Creek County, much less still in the path of this clan.
The beam of her lantern revealed a masculine profile, a very masculine profile. Will stood about fifteen feet from the cluster of men and dogs who bobbed and bayed around a rotted-out tree.
“It’s a den tree,” Dwayne yelled. “He’s up there, but we can’t see him.”
Patsy crunched toward them. Only Ralph saw her approach. He stood in greeting, leaving Will’s side long enough to sniff her leg. Will noticed Ralph’s absence and turned.
“Oh, we were expecting you.” His voice was warm as he stepped toward her.
Her heart did a little patter move. It was nice to be wanted, to have someone happy to see you. Nice, but not enough. Besides, she had a dog to rescue. Tamping down the warm fuzzy, she stomped forward.
“What do you mean, you were expecting me? Did you find Pugnacious?” Patsy suddenly realized she was tense. She had concentrated on her annoyance with the dog for escaping and Granny for breaking her out. Seeing Will broke through that barrier, and the fear for Pugnacious poured out. “Is she okay? Why didn’t you bring her home?”
Will pointed to the mass surging around the tree.
“You don’t mean… She isn’t in there?” Patsy swung her light to the base of the tree. Clawing her way upward was Pugnacious. Randy’s and Dwayne’s hounds slammed into her in their own attempts to get to whatever had holed up in the oak, but the pug held her ground.
Pugnacious couldn’t take on a coon. She could be killed. In a panic, Patsy ran toward the tree. “Dwayne Clark, get my dog out of there. What were you thinking?”
